An Early Fall Day At Great Brook Farm in Carlisle, MA

The one where we have a hard time saying goodbye to summer

Summer officially becomes autumn in New England this Saturday, September 22 at 10:49AM. EDT. But with a Saturday weather forecast of sunny skies and temperatures in the mid 70′s, it sure will be easy to pretend that it’s still summer.

If you just can’t let go and need to make one more awesome summertime memory with your friends and family, Great Brook Farm State Park in Carlisle, Massachusetts provides a wonderful setting for just that. Here’s how you do it.

When you pull into the main parking lot at Great Brook Farm, the perfect picnic location should be obvious. Yes, it’s that beautiful field that borders the pond and is conveniently situated alongside the parking lot. So basically, you can open the doors and unleash the impatient “when are we going to be there?” younglings in the backseat and let them run free.

Photo Credit: JJ Toothman

Take a nature walk through the woods

A walk on the trails at Great Break Farm provides lots of treasures. There are the small fields of wood ferns, rock skipping ponds, and small streams hidden away that even have tiny beaches for sand play. The trails are multi use. Dogs can be off leash and horses are also welcome(darn, we forgot ours). Mountain biking is also popular here so keep an eye out for agro-man careening down the path. Great Brook Farm also seems to be one of those places where young cyclists come to hone their off-road skills with mom and dad. With a plentiful amount of big, wide trails, we can see why.

Some trails, such as Heartbreak Ridge are more single track. On those trails, definitely be aware of passing mountain bikers. Having a trail map handy is a good idea as well. While trails are identified with signs and markers, it’s easy to get turned around when you’re having such a good time.

Photo Credit: JJ Toothman

Find that treasure

A variety of geocaches can be found at Great Brook Farm. On a visit a few weeks ago, we successfully found Hasselhoff’s Hide. And yes, I picked that one because it was named after The Hoff. Sadly, the cache was absent of any Knight Rider stuff. I, ummm… I meant to say, my kids were really hoping for a K.I.T.T. hot wheels car.

Eat ice cream

No summer day is complete without ice cream. Wrap up your nature trail walk back near the parking lot and farm fresh ice cream. Signs will point you in the right direction. This is no basic ice cream stand featuring only simple flavors like vanilla and chocolate. They have 50 flavors on hand, including the likes of Pomegranate Chip to choose from. Stick with a kids size cone. This is super rich stuff. Even a regular size cone is probably left to the truly ambitious and if your drive isn’t too far, you can even bring a quart home.

Some things to know

The ice cream is soooo good that you’ll definitely want to bring some home. You might want to bring a cooler and a small bag of ice to make sure that quart makes it back home in one piece. That’s just a little effort for great reward later.

Cell phone reception is pretty good.

Bathrooms are of the port-a-potty variety.

Parking costs $2.

Bringing cash is recommended. While the parking machine and the ice cream stand both accept credit cards, this seems like an out of the way place where technology (and thus, credit card processing) can be undependable. Cash only signs at the ice cream stand register wouldn’t be of much surprise.

In addition to poison ivy, watch out for horse shit. While we could provide a helpful link to assist with proper identification, we’re afraid to find out that the horse shit link is the most clicked on item in this email.

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What we did after launching Boston OFC

We deployed our newsites about two weeks ago to do some initial field testing. Then, this past Friday, started communicating their availability to out existing subscribers and to our friends on Facebook.

And there was much celebration.

Chris celebrated by heading outside with his daughters and building a snowman.

I gotta say, that just may be the most perfect snowman I’ve ever seen. I’m willing to bet he’s compiled a snowman decoration kit for times like this, and, if so, he should write about that in time for next winter.

Meanwhile, the snowstorm left 16 inches on snow on my property. After clearing off my driveway, I joined my wife at the neighbors house, where we proceeded to celebrate with…

Then Saturday came and the day after the storm brought 45 degrees and clear, sunny skis. A perfect day for spring sledding.

Last thought. Chris and I have been so heads down in getting the first version of boston.outdoorfunclub.com out there that we didn’t realize that we were starting to share it with people on the same weekend of SXSW Interactive. Which means there’s about 13,684 other products and services being unleashed this weekend and they’re all trying to grab your digital attention span.

And no, we’re not in Austin for SXSW. We’d rather be here, getting the next issue ready to share with you.

Outdoor Fun Club 1.0

Last week was significant one for Outdoor Fun Club. We updated our homepage and unveiled our Boston content archives at boston.outdoorfunclub.com. The Boston site represents the first of many regional sites we plan to roll out in the future. Each site will be rich with actionable outdoor inspiration to encourage and facilitate experiencing the great outdoors while making lifetime memories.

For the past year, we’ve been writing articles and publishing a weekly email newsletter for people in the Greater Boston area. We’ve covered a number of hikes, including hikes you can even try at night! We published a memory making plan for a day of bicycling on Plum Island. Last summer, there was the first hand account of trying to find a secret beach on Cape Cod. We’ve also explored some weekend outings to Cape Ann, The Berkshires, and Stowe. All of those articles and much more are now available at boston.outdoorfunclub.com.

We’ve worked hard to provide a content experience that can be consumed equally on your desktop, tablet, and smartphone browsers. We’re the first to say that it’s far from perfect. We’ve got lots of ideas and plans for improving your experience and interaction with our content. We also understand that there is much work for us to do to achieve our mission of helping you get outdoors to make memories with your friends and family. These are the nascent days of Outdoor Fun Club. We’re just getting started.

Launching the Boston edition of Outdoor Fun Club

We’re in the process of launching the Boston web edition of Outdoor Fun Club. Should be any day now. Just need to dot some I’s and cross some T’s. Our weekly email will resume publishing not too long after that.

Those of you who have been with us since the beginning (coming up on a year), thanks for sticking with us.